Martin Wolf
@ Financial Times:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This comment of Mark Twain applies with great force to policy on money and banking. Some are sure that the troubled western economies suffer from a surfeit of money. Meanwhile, orthodox policy makers believe that the right way to revive economies is by forcing private spending back up. Almost everybody agrees that monetary financing of governments is lethal. These beliefs are all false.
As Claudio Borio of the Bank for International Settlements puts it in a
recent paper, “The financial cycle and macroeconomics: what have we
learnt?”, “deposits are not endowments that precede loan formation; it
is loans that create deposits”. Thus, when banks cease to lend, deposits
stagnate. In the UK, the lending counterpart of M4 was 17 per cent
lower at the end of 2012 than in March 2009. (See charts.)
When arguing that monetary policy is already too loose, critics point to exceptionally low interest rates and the expansion of central bank balance sheets. Yet Milton Friedman himself, doyen of postwar monetary economists, argued that the quantity of money alone matters.
